Distributors

Prior to the AWS Partner Summit in Sydney, Amazon Web Services determined that all attendees were feeling the rhythm, encouraged through a percussion performance from Inrhythm opening proceedings.

As such, the entire crowd were invited to take part in the experience with various noise-makers
scattered throughout the audience, many of whom took the opportunity to
get in the swing of things.

AWS head of channels and alliances Australia and New Zealand, Stefan
Jansen, then took to the stage to speak business, discussing the diversity of the AWS partner network.

“The AWS team has
worked hard to put together content that will be of value to partners and It has been a fantastic
year for AWS, we ended in a tornado of customer adoption and
interest," he said.

Jansen continued with
the message that ran through last year's summit that Cloud is the new
normal.

Also in attendance was AWS global vice-president of channels and alliances, Terry Wise, who is widely credited for building
the AWS partner program - he began by giving credit to the team at AWS
and, more importantly, the partner community.

Defining the partner
opportunity with AWS

Wise said AWS
customers were largely succeeding with the help of one or more
partners and in Australia, these partnerships were breeding some
of the most exciting uses of the AWS platform.

“Some of the biggest
innovations that have happened in globally with AWS have come out of
this market,” he said. “Many of the
enterprise we have seen going all in on AWS, many of those trends
have happened here first.

“You guys are pushing
us in terms of the services and programs we are building.”

Wise went on to
describe how all industries were adopting Cloud technologies, citing it as a "fantastic opportunity" for the local channel.

“We are seeing
companies like Air BnB and Uber, built on the Cloud,” he said. “We are used to
calling these companies start-ups, but they are not, they are the new
enterprise.

“We are also seeing
all enterprise aggressively adopting Cloud technologies to better
serve their business and their customers. The market is
accelerating and the change is happening faster than we have ever
seen before almost in the history of IT."

Wise said AWS now had more than one million active customers, again, representing a key opportunity of growth for partners.

"These customers
are looking for help in a variety of different ways," he said. "They are looking
for software products they can deploy on the platform to serve
various use cases.

"They are looking for
systems integration and consulting partners that can help transition
their business for the future whether that is bringing existing
applications to AWS, building new applications or managing those
applications."

For Wise, the
most successful partners were those partnering
with customers to up-skill staff on the AWS platform, evolving business and internal skill sets in the process.

Serving up the layer cake

“There is an
opportunity to make a lot of money here if we are doing the right
thing by customers,” Wise continued.

"There are many many
different ways to make money whether you are a systems integrator or
a consulting firm. Everything from strategy, to planning and total
cost of ownership, to new application development, to offering third
party applications on a resale model.

The AWS channels chief said there was a great
migration opportunity across apps, infrastructure and database.

Wise also highlighted
managed services, not just on the infrastructure side, "We have a lot
of customers coming to us and asking to be put in touch with a
partner that can manage and deliver the end to end stack.

“It is pretty common
that many different layers of the cake are going to be outsourced to
different partners. One might do infrastructure and managed services,
one might do application managed services and one might do
application development.

Wise added that one of the
trends the company was seeing was that many enterprise customers were
complaining that this process takes too long and was too complicated.
He added that these customers were looking for one partner to manage
the end to end stack and asking the Cloud vendor to help them
identify those skilled partners.

“Of course, you can
see from an economic perspective, the more of these layers of the
cake you support, the larger the revenue opportunity,” he added.

“It's a massive
opportunity here, there are many different ways to make money and the
really great thing about it is that pretty much all of this is what
many of us have been doing for decades.

“It is a little bit
of a different operating model and a different technology stack but
in terms of strategy and architecture, this stuff has been bread and
butter.”

Slideshows

Selling beyond the CIO – How partners can influence the new breed of tech buyers

This ARN Roundtable, in association with Oracle, highlighted the emergence of a new breed of technology buyer, assessing how partners can engage outside of IT, and the skills required to sell across new business units.

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